John Baker’s Blog

Extract from a speech by Heinrich Himmler, to Schutzstaffel (SS) officers at Poznan on the 4th October,1943:
In the months that have gone by since we met in June 1942 many of our comrades were killed, giving their lives for Germany and the Fuhrer. In the first rank - and I ask you to rise in [...]

In the Kenyon Review, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky discusses this strange beast we call America, and the role of fiction in our lives.
I’ve always assumed that one of the basic needs that literature serves is to allow us to imagine experiences we may never have and solicit our empathy for those whose lives are unlike [...]

At the Times Online Ben Macintyre considers the art of a good book title
The words that matter most in any book, of course, are neither at the beginning nor the end, but on the front cover. Would great books have become great books had they been called something else? In 1924, a young writer sent [...]

Sexism in the workplace, circa 1943